Like classical
T Tauri stars, many brown dwarfs are surrounded by
disks of gas and dust which accrete onto the brown dwarf. 2M1207 was first suspected to have such a disk because of its broad Hα line. This was later confirmed by
ultraviolet spectroscopy. and with
ALMA. In general,
accretion from disks are known to produce fast-moving
jets, perpendicular to the disk, of ejected material. This has also been observed for 2M1207; an April 2007 paper in the
Astrophysical Journal reports that this brown dwarf is spouting jets of material from its poles. The jets, which extend around 109 kilometers into space, were discovered using the
Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the
European Southern Observatory. Material in the jets streams into space at a few kilometers per second. While previous observations with the
Spitzer spectrograph already detected
acetylene (C2H2)
emission in the disk of 2M1207, new observations with
MIRI revealed emission of a wide variety of
chemicals in the disk, showing a
carbon-rich chemistry. In this study 2M1207 and
ISO-ChaI 147 showed the largest number of
organic molecules, including the only detection of
ethylene (C2H4) in this sample. The detected chemicals include 9
hydrocarbons, with
diacetylene (C4H2) and
benzene (C6H6) being two prominent emission lines in the spectrum of 2M1207. Other emissions by chemicals in the disk are
hydrogen gas (H2),
hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and
carbon dioxide (CO2). 2M1207b shows weak accretion from a disk, inferred from emission lines of
hydrogen and
helium in medium-resolution
NIRSpec data. Surprisingly 2M1207b does not show absorption due to
methane, which was predicted to be present for this object. It was suggested that very young objects have a L/T-transition starts at a later spectral type. == See also ==